Generally printers used by higher education institutions and corporate organizations are connected to an internal or local network so that the printers may be shared between the users. i.e. the students and staff or workers.
In order to control access as well as to control or limit the costs associated with printing, document management or print accounting systems, collectively referred to as authenticated printing systems, are used for tracking and accounting for printing activity. Print activity tracking and accounting is typically based on a user's network username. For this to work each print job should comprise the user's network username in the print job details. Accordingly when a user prints a document from his personal computer, PC, the print job generated from the document that the user wishes to print has the user's network username in the job details or print job metadata, e.g. in the header of the print job file, for use by the authenticated printing systems. When the user prints from a conventional PC the network user name is readily available for incorporation in the print job details as the user typically logs on onto the PC, and onto the local network to which the PC is connected, using the network user name.
Such a system works well with users who are already associated with the authenticated printing systems, i.e. users who already have user accounts with their user names and user credentials stored or registered in the authenticated printing system. Such users are typically students or staff, at a higher education institution, or workers in a corporate organization, i.e. users who are to have continuous access to the authenticated printing system.
Guests to a higher education institution or a corporate organization may however also require printing facilities. Guests may for example include visiting scientists or lecturers, customers, clients, or other temporary users and in many cases the higher education institution or corporate organization may want to provide guests with access to the authenticated printing system. Furthermore, guest printing may also be provided by for example a hotel to its guests.
Techniques for handling guest print jobs for providing printing facilities to guests or other temporary users are known from inter alia U.S. Pat. No. 7,551,319B2, U.S. Pat. No. 8,185,948B2 and U.S. Pat. No. 7,315,834B2.